


for i don't, nor should you

by sunsmasher



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Established Sylvain/Ingrid, Getting Together, Happy Ending, I promise, Major Character Injury, Multi, One-Sided Dimitri/Felix, Post-Blue Lions Route (Fire Emblem: Three Houses)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-19
Updated: 2020-04-14
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:13:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 13,142
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23208310
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunsmasher/pseuds/sunsmasher
Summary: “Felix’s last night in Gautier is going great and I’m having a great time,” Sylvain says, with apparent sincerity. Felix knocks back his wine as Ingrid glares at him. “Felix, we may not see you again for years, knowing your busy schedule! Tell us things. Got any plans once you’re back in Fhirdiad?”--Five years after the war, Felix hits a wall. Sylvain and Ingrid pick him back up.
Relationships: Felix Hugo Fraldarius/Ingrid Brandl Galatea/Sylvain Jose Gautier
Comments: 25
Kudos: 147





	1. Chapter 1

They flatten against the hallway walls as the huntsmaster’s kid struggles past them with another haunch of bleeding venison and Sylvain says, “But you’re _sure_ you can’t stay. Not even another week.”

Felix rolls his eyes for the fourth time that hour. Late fall in Gautier is a bitter, gnawing freeze and even in his furs, with his shoulder against the oak doorjamb outside the castle kitchens, firelight and smoke and meaty-smelling warmth flooding into the corridor, his jaw aches with the cold. Sylvain, leaning against the opposite wall, wears shirtsleeves and a smile.

“No,” Felix says. “Obviously. Some of us have jobs to do, idiot.”

Sylvain laughs, golden light from the kitchen hearth bouncing off his cheek and bare neck. His skin hasn’t kept the nutty tan it once had, when they were young men at the monastery and spent all their hours in the bright mountain sunlight, but even after five Gautier winters he’s still darker than Felix. And apparently warmer. “Just because I don’t spend nine months of the year in Fhirdiad at Dimitri’s side doesn’t mean I do _nothing,”_ Sylvain replies, happily scolding. “I had several meetings this summer! I negotiated a trade agreement!”

“His Majesty negotiated the agreement, Gautier. Just because your family has always acted like the border is another continent—”

“His _Majesty_ doesn’t even speak Srenget! Or know the going price for giants’ ivory! Are my contributions to the Kingdom worth _nothing_ to you, you fussy bastard?”

Felix glares at him, ready for the fight, but then another red leg of elk shoves between them and Ingrid says from behind it, “If I drop this thing because you two can’t have an argument over a table like a regular pair of poppinjays, there’s going to be hell to pay.”

Felix has seen it happen a hundred times in the past two weeks, and yet it never loses that slight dizzying effect— the way Sylvain swings to Ingrid, the way his hands come forward and his eyes crease, the way the whole of his attention opens to her like a flower to the sun. The hairy lump of meat she’s carrying is the size of Felix’s torso. Sylvain arranges his arms around it. He takes her ruddy, wind-chapped cheeks in his hands and kisses her with the committed reverence of a priest. Like he’s never gotten the chance before. Like they haven’t been married five years this winter.

Felix fixes his eyes to a loosening seam in his sleeve. Ingrid left with the huntsmaster at sunrise. Sylvain’s not going to relinquish her until she makes him.

Eventually, after a truly obscene amount of time, there’s a soft sound of breath and a few quiet mumbles. Sylvain strokes his thumb over her freckled check, Ingrid allots a last quick kiss to the mole on his chin, and then she raises an eyebrow at Felix. The quartered elk shifts in her grip, dribbling a little on the floor. “So are we just going to stand here?” she says, and Sylvain laughs and leads the way into the kitchens.

* * *

Felix ignored about eight successive invitations from the Lord and Lady Gautier and Galatea before he finally agreed to ride out from Fhirdiad for a short ( _short)_ visit. Loathe as he always was to leave his responsibilities in the capital, the last letter did appear to signal a limit to their patience. Ingrid signed it as _Margravine._ Rarely did she mean anyone well when she did that.

It had been a long time since he’d spent more than a rushed evening of drinks or dinner in Fhirdiad with either of them, to their point. Felix spends two-thirds of the year at the King’s side, as his father did before him, serving as his shield, his second, the right hand of House Blaiddyd. It didn’t leave him time much for even the management of his own lands, let alone taking social tours of united Fodlan. Without the assurances of his castellan in Fraldarius that the duchy would not fall to pieces with two weeks’ less of his usual, usually distracted, personal attention, he wouldn’t have ridden over the mountains into Gautier at all.

He is, though he plans to admit this to no one while he still draws breath, a little glad he listened to his castellan.

“Don’t you start, my lord!” one of the cooks snaps, brandishing a knife the length of Felix’s arm at Sylvain when he tries to swipe an end of bread from her countertop.

“My dear Nathalie, I would never!” Sylvain laughs, tripping backwards, bouncing his hip off Ingrid’s as she unloads her animal carcass onto the hunstmaster and his apprentice, who wait to prep and salt it for winter stores with one of the younger cooks. Sylain and Ingrid released most of the castle staff for the winter a few days ago, sending them back to their own homes with coin in hand and a promise to see them again in the new year, when the worst of the snows had finished falling. Maybe a quarter of the full staff stayed—those essential enough that Sylvain paid them extra to winter at the castle, like the garrison troops, plus those who had no other home they could or would go to— but even with that hearty reduction, the kitchens still feel as packed with bodies as ever. “I’ve never started a thing in my life!”

“Too close to true, my love,” Ingrid replies, sweet as a peach, making Sylvain laugh again, firelight bright in his face.

“No respect!” he cries, throwing a wrist over his eyes. “My lady wife, my own staff—I’m beset on all sides!”

Blaiddyd Castle isn’t like this. Twice the size of Gautier, three times the number of bodies packed into it, but it doesn’t hold half the life. Not that Felix has felt, the past five years.

“And whose fault is that?” he calls across the central table, trying to stay moving in case someone hands him a piece of elk or, goddess forbid, a cooking implement.

Sylvain moans again, as theatrical as possible. Ingrid gooses him as she squeezes past once more. The head cook, Nathalie, shakes her grey head. “Making a nuisance of yourself in the kitchens, arguing with your wife before the servants. Imagine what the old Margrave would think?”

“Absolutely nothing good!” Sylvain says, “And—“

 _“Thank Sothis for that!”_ Felix shouts, echoing Ingrid and Sylvain, and smiles, unable to help it, as Sylvain beams and pulls Ingrid into another kiss and Ingrid laughs and lets him and the cook scolds them all for taking the goddess’ name in vain but then smiles herself, humming something happy and tuneless as she presses her knife into the fresh-cracked crust of the bread.

Sylvain and Felix and Ingrid are, in due time, shuffled out of the kitchens with a promise that their dinner will soon follow. Ingrid tries to insist they’re adults who can carry a few plates upstairs themselves. Nathalie and her staff are apparently used to this line of argument, and go profoundly deaf until the nobility troop out.

“Some day,” Ingrid says, one fist clenching as Felix and Sylvain trail her up the tight stone steps, “some day that woman will let me touch a dish.”

It has the flavor of a long-standing grievance, and Sylvain duly confirms the inevitability of Ingrid’s victory over his staff’s notions of propriety as they cross into the newest wing of the castle. It’s markedly warmer than the old fortress that houses the kitchens, the laundries, the grandest of the dining halls, and onto which generations of Gautiers have tried to graft a room that will actually retain heat. The new wing doesn’t do a bad job. The hallways are carpeted from wall to wall, tapestries hung between every door, every window glazed and firmly shuttered. It’s still fucking freezing, of course, but at least Felix’s fingers are regaining sensation.

They eat in the small dining room attached to Sylvain and Ingrid’s apartment, surrounded by the couple’s books and clothes and unanswered correspondence. Ingrid sweeps a pile of paper onto an empty chair when a young man appears in the door with a tray of steaming bowls. Sylvain picks the pile back up and deposits it on a desk in the corner as the stew is laid out. They pour their own wine, raise their glasses, and toast the King.

“May his reign be as long and powerful and ever so slightly curved as his—“

 _“Sylvain,”_ Felix snarls.

“His lance! Goddess, Felix, what’s gotten into you? Mind like a gutter.”

“I just think they could afford me a little more respect, considering how many of their damn pirate crews I’ve killed,” Ingrid says, spoon halfway to her lips and bowl halfway to empty as Sylvain pours them all more wine and Felix reaches for another slice of bread. The stove in the corner hisses contentedly, buttressing the walls with heat. “I’m perfectly capable of negotiating in your stead.”

“Look, you don’t have to convince me,” Sylvain says around a chunk of potato, gesturing with his spoon. “Personally, honey, I’m scared shitless of you. But Sreng’s just held together a lot more loosely than Fodlan. The pirates aren’t coming from Tngmet’s bound-clans, so he doesn’t care that you killed the pirates.”

“The diarchs care that I killed the pirates.”

“Yeah, well, Tngmet doesn’t care much about the diarchs, either. Border lords are always a bit up their own asses.”

Felix snorts loudly. Sylvain doesn’t hear him. Or ignores him. “Vus was a perfectly nice man!” Ingrid says.

“Yes, and then Vus fell down a crevasse and now we’ve got Tngmet. And Tngmet is a fool, a charlatan, who thinks that just because you can’t wield the Lance you also can’t slice him from neck to nuts,” Sylvain says, waving his knife demonstratively. “It’s fine, I’ll just go up the pass next week, see what the hell he wants this time. You can spare me for a day or two.”

“Yes, but if he’d just treat with me, I can fly up there in half the time you can ride—“

“Ingrid, my love, I am unclear what you want me to do—“

“Ugh!” Ingrid throws her hands back, pushing away from the table. “Nothing. Tngmet’s an ass. It’s your fault if he invades.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” Sylvain says, smiling.

“Don’t smile at me,” Ingrid says. “Felix, let’s talk about you.”

“Pass,” says Felix, leaning back in his chair.

“No passing.” Ingrid takes two hefty slices of bread, mops up the rest of her stew, and stuffs the both of them in her mouth. Muffled: “Chop chop.”

Felix leans farther back in his chair, balancing on two legs in the deep pile of the carpet. “You’re a miserable host.”

Ingrid raises both eyebrows in an uncharitable fashion. “You think you’re so delightful a guest?”

“Felix’s last night in Gautier is going great and I’m having a great time,” Sylvain says, with apparent sincerity. Felix knocks back his wine as Ingrid glares at him. “Felix, we may not see you again for years, knowing your busy schedule! Tell us things. Got any plans once you’re back in Fhirdiad?”

Felix shifts, letting his chair thump back to the floor. It doesn’t make much of a noise. The crackling stove is louder, and Ingrid’s chewing, and the noise at the door as the young man who brought their plates returns to clear them away. “Not really,” he says.

“Not really?” Ingrid repeats. “Honestly?”

“I have work to do,” Felix frowns. “Keeping the continent afloat, maintaining the peace, making sure His Majesty doesn’t get himself killed. What are you expecting?”

“It is the end of the year,” Sylvain says, voice gently teasing as Ingrid helps stack their plates for the flustered servant at her shoulder. “You must be doing something besides carrying Dimitri’s hem around. A party for yearsend? Going first-footing around the capital?”

“No,” Felix replies, short. He forces himself to relax his jaw. “Why would I do that?”

“I’ve always wanted to go first-footing with you,” Ingrid muses, propping her hand on one first. “You’ve got such pretty dark hair. Very lucky.”

“What about something for the solstice? Is Ashe in town? Gonna set something on fire with Ashe?” Sylvain asks.

“Obviously not.”

“Maybe he’ll spend a long winter night in prayer to the goddess,” Ingrid says to Sylvain.

“Or go plant a willow beneath the waxing moon, for great wealth and headache relief in the new year,” Sylvain says to Ingrid.

“Willows don’t even—you’re making that one up,” Felix snaps.

“Well, I hope he’s not leaving us for a cold room in the capital and no parties whatsoever,” Sylvain says again to Ingrid, happily ignoring Felix’s rising ire. “That would certainly be rude of him.”

“Rude in the extreme,” Ingrid agrees, grinning wide at Sylvain. “Unforgivable, really.”

“I have _duties,”_ Felix bites out. “I serve the King. Is that not enough to be fucking keeping on with?”

“No, hey, we’re sorry,” Sylvain says, still smiling, hands up and placating. “We just want to make sure our best friend isn’t—“ his open hands waver, a moment’s hesitation, “bored. All winter. But obviously you’ll be fine, of course. If nothing else Dimitri must be doing the usual shindig at—“

“He’s not doing shit for yearsend,” Felix snarls, short and foul. “The King Consort’s in Duscur until spring.”

It stops the conversation neatly. “Yeah, of course,” Sylvain says, and shifts the conversation back to Srenget politics. It’s smooth. Doesn’t even shoot Ingrid a worried glance.

They return to discussion of jumpy border lords and Felix sits and tastes the sour stink of his own tone all through his next glass of wine. Why does he have to do this? It’s his last night here, the last time he’ll see them both for months and all he can do is… ruin dinner. Make them feel bad for asking polite questions. For being his friends. Why is he _doing_ this to them?

His oldest friends in the world, bar one.

“Maybe if von Aegir could find his own ass with two hands,” he manages when the conversation comes back around, a heated debate on how to quell the little wars that will surely erupt in the old Imperial territories come spring. Did they leave an opportunity to insult waiting for him? That would be like them to do so. It would be like him to need it. He clenches his bare fingers in his shirtsleeve, feeling the sensation of wine growing between his eyes. “You honestly expect him to handle this on his own?”

“No!” Ingrid says. “Thank you, Felix!” Her relief is obvious in her smile.

The conversation carries them away from the table and into a sitting room next door, kept luxuriantly warm by its own glowing stove and the heavy drapes over the windows. Felix sits at the end of one of the long, low couches, pressing himself against the arm as Sylvain pulls into Ingrid into a happy, uncoordinated spin around the room.

They look so… delighted in each other, he thinks, as he claps his hands for them, unsure, off-beat. Every day they have, for the past two weeks. Like one is the only creature necessary to the other’s happiness. His big hands hold hers, trail down her back, spinning her grandly between the armchairs to the tune of a song he can’t sing. She giggles like when they were all children, guiding Sylvain surely between the furniture. Her short, shining hair catches the lamplight like spun gold.

Maybe it’s the wine, maybe it’s not: Felix can’t take his eyes off them. Like he’s dying for thirst, and he thinks they’re the water. Him the beggar, them the feast. Like if he looks and looks every moment he can, when they won’t see, when they won’t look back, maybe it won’t leave him emptier.

And of course the nastiest part is—he feels empty all the time.

He forgot he could feel otherwise, until he spent two freezing weeks on the border with Sylvain and Ingrid.

They join him on the couch, they uncork the good Morfis brandy, the castle grows quiet. They sit and drink, for hours it feels like, Ingrid and Sylvain talking about Sreng, about Faerghus, about when they were kids and used to pile leaves into Dimitri’s hood, one by one, as quietly as they could, until the wind would pick up and he’d pull on his hood and shower himself in detritus.

Ingrid and Sylvain laugh. Felix tries to. He offers what snide remarks he can.

The brandy may have been a mistake. The sour taste in his mouth is back, and no matter how warm the room gets, the stove cherry-red in the corner, Ingrid’s body pressed to his from hip to shoulder, Sylvain’s weight leaned against them both—he still feels cold. Throughout the whole hollow of him, like a chill he can’t work off.

He looks up from his empty glass. She’s pressed between them but watches only Sylvain, watches his long hands move in some appalling gesture, and laughs when he wants her to, laughs again when she tries to chide him for it and stumbles drunkenly over her words.

He looks at her like she hung the moon.

Felix looks away.

“You’ll really be okay in Fhirdiad, Felix?” she asks him, soft and a little slurred, as the stove finally chills between the tapestries, their bodies slumping together on the sofa.

“Of course,” he says, tongue heavy, tone as certain as he can make it. “I am every year.”

“I know,” she says, softer still. Sylvain snores against her far shoulder. “I just worry. Will Mercedes be in town. Or Annette?”

“I don’t know,” Felix says.

“So it’ll just be you and Dimitri?”

Felix swallows, feeling her tufty hair brush his jaw, feeling her warm fingers try to grasp his own. “And the two hundred other people who live in the castle,” he says, in order to not say: _Yes._

Just him and the man he’s in love with. The man he’s been in love with for god knows how many fruitless, miserable years.

“Stay on more day, Felix,” Ingrid says. She’s nearly asleep. Her lips just brush his shoulder. “Just for us.”

He can’t do that to them. He can’t...inflict himself upon them, no matter their kindnesses. At least in Fhridiad he has a place, however pitiful it is.

“I’ll think about it,” he says.

They see him off in the morning.

* * *

A faint, gray snow is falling as Felix tightens the buckle on his stirrup leather. He’s done so twice already, and the gelding he took from Dimitri’s stables is starting to grow impatient.

He needs to leave.

“And you promise you’ll write,” Sylvain says, his arms tight around Ingrid’s shoulders, the both of them huddled together against the chill. The whole courtyard outside Castle Gautier looks unfeatured in the flat dawn light, no shadows or spots of sun, just three figures and the horse and the silent grey snow. Ingrid shivers underneath her cloak and Sylvain pulls her closer. They’re both still half-asleep, still a little fuzzy with last night’s drink.

Felix is unfortunately clear-headed. “Obviously,” he says.

Ingrid frowns, snow wetting the messy tips of her hair. “Come visit more,” she says. Demands, he supposes. “And make sure you’re in the capital for the spring festivals. We’ll both be there for at least a week.”

“I do have to be home at some point to oversee the planting,” Felix replies, matching her frown.

“It’s a two days’ ride between you and Fhirdiad at the _most_ , Felix.”

“Either way,” Sylvain says, with another squeeze of Ingrid’s shoulders. He could be almost unaffected by the cold that’s already starting to work into Felix’s joints, if it weren’t for the chapped red slopes of his cheeks. “We’ll be there. And here. Conspire to meet us in at least one of those places.”

“Sure,” Felix says, looking at the inky trees. “Somewhere.”

There’s a moment of quiet, like when two people exchange significant looks, and then Ingrid says, “We’ll miss you, Felix. Thank you for coming.”

She probably even means it. Sylvain’s arm slides off her shoulder and she steps forward, pressing her lips to his cold cheek. Then Sylvain is there, kissing above his temple. “Don’t be a stranger,” he says to Felix’s hair.

Finally, Felix pulls away. “Thank you both for your hospitality,” he says with a small bow, which makes them both laugh, and then he mounts his horse and pulls its head around and goes.

He looks back, just before the open gates and the old Imperial road, but they’re already inside. The snow is filling in their tracks.

They had laughed, but he’s more grateful than he really cares to think about, that they let him impose upon them for two weeks. He has no place in their home or in their marriage, but they let him stay and hoard their scraps. They didn’t owe him that.

The day brightens in fits and starts as Felix and his gelding climb the foothills into the mountains, pointed south, leaning west. Great phalanxes of cloud pass over the rising sun, blown down from Sreng and ominously dark. The pass into the southern reaches of Gautier usually doesn’t close until nearly the new year, but he’s glad he left when he did. For any number of reasons.

He tries to enjoy the ride. He remembers a very long time ago when it wasn’t a struggle. He’s never cared much for horses, which have never cared for him, but long rides like this used to appeal to him. He used to like the sounds of the birds and a silent road, the tense burn in his thighs, the feeling of constant motion. Now, though, it’s hard to reach. He’s tired and hungover. The wind rips the warmth from his exposed skin and he can’t remember what it was like to like this.

Sylvain and Ingrid were married so soon after the war ended. It was one celebration among many, an enormous rush of matrimonies after the Empire fell that left Fhridiad in a heightened state of absolute nonsense for months during the rebuilding. Dimitri and Dedue’s was the largest and most insufferable, of course. Sylvain and Ingrid didn’t even attempt to match them. They waited just long enough for Ingrid’s parents to arrive from Galatea, pledged to each other before the new-minted Archbishop and a dozen friends and family in the castle chapel, and left Fhirdiad a week later. Sylvain, as he told it, made it home before his father even heard he’d been married.

Sylvain had said it then, too. Don’t be a stranger, with that odd tone in his voice. And Ingrid had kissed his cheek, before she left for Galatea and the rearrangement of her affairs. They had known what was going to happen, even if Felix was too caught up in Dimitri’s affairs to notice. All the things they had meant to each other during the war would be gone, subsumed by marriage and reconstruction and the needs of the throne. There would be no more long marches to and from the monastery. No more nights slapping away bugs at the fire. A promise to die protecting someone didn’t mean much when the only enemies left were bureaucrats.

Which is too bad. Maybe that would have been the thing Felix was good at.

The valley between Sreng and the body of Faerghus, where the hero Gautier first made his fort and a score of Sylvain’s ancestors have since frozen to death, is long and deep and narrow, like a strike through the earth. Felix climbs the southern road quickly, stopping only long enough to make the horse stop foaming at the bit. The lady cook sent him off with food for travel but he has no appetite, so he stands and looks back down the switchbacks, towards the old hero’s fort, as the horse cranes its neck for some dessicated leaf still clinging to its branch.

He shouldn’t have come, maybe. It could have been better not to remember, to live the life he had, split between Fhirdiad and Fraldarius, and be done with it. Dimitri was… something beyond his reach, Dimitri was not for him and never would be, but Felix could still serve. He has served, and been satisfied with that.

There was no need to bring Ingrid and Sylvain back into it.

He—

There’s motion, high up on the slopes of the northern mountains, away across the valley.

Felix makes a fist and stares through it, forcing focus into his exhausted eye. Suggestions of riders in the faraway snow turn into strong implications, black ant shapes massing just at the lip of the pass between Gautier and Sreng.

Merchants, ruinously late in the season? No, there’s no wagon-shapes, none of the protective formations of outriders. And the way they gather, just behind the downslope, so as to be hidden from the castle towers—

There’s a flash of bright, striking gold. Like a coin slipped between hands. Someone’s unfurling a war banner.

Felix throws himself onto the horse.

Ten minutes into a barely-controlled gallop down the icy slope, Felix remembers the horn tied to his saddlebags. Scrabbling behind himself, left hand an aching claw around the reins, he yanks it free of its tie and blows. The first sound sputters out. The second echoes like a rockfall. He makes it back through the castle’s southern gate a tenth-second before the portcullis drops.

“Felix!” Ingrid shouts, as he dismounts in the courtyard. Dimitri’s horse has a slight near-death look. Felix leaves it for someone else to take care of. “Was that your horn?” She’s significantly more awake than when Felix left a few hours ago, buckled into her armor and running a hand through her hair. 

“Thank you,” says Sylvain, low and serious, clapping a hand to Felix’s shoulder as he and his mount come up alongside. “We wouldn’t have seen them until they were halfway down the mountain.”

Felix nods, tight-mouthed, as soldiers in Gautier livery stream out of the barracks and through the courtyard and out the northern gate. “Who are they?” he asks, as Sylvain and Ingrid mount their horses and he jogs after them over the cobbles. He didn’t actually miss this part of fighting with his old friends.

“The Srenget,” Sylvain says over his shoulder, like an asshole.

“No shit.” Felix frowns harder. “Where the fuck is your lance?”

Ingrid eyes her husband. “Sylvain,” she says, with a warning tone.

“I know where the Lance is,” he says to them both, then raises an armored hand when Ingrid starts frowning, too. The sky beyond Gautier’s northern wall is a quickly-darkening vault, held heavy over the Gautier forces taking formation in the empty fields between wall and black pine forest.

“Is that supposed to be an answer?” Felix says.

“If we need it, I’ll call for it, okay?” Sylvain’s horse dances under him, neck arching and ears flashing up. “It’s not going to be a problem. Look, they’re not even going to make it across the river before the archers get them, alright? We don’t need to worry about this.”

Gautier Castle is positioned on a broad rise in the southern wall of the valley, with a view to the north that encompasses the bare-branched forests, the towering mountains, the knife-mark slots in the bare rock that hold waterfalls in the summer. Felix stands at the edge of the slope, wind yanking like a child at his hair. He watches with Sylvain and Ingrid and Gautier’s battalions as the unidentified forces of Sreng reach the valley’s river.

It’s vast and fast and still surging with foam. It won’t freeze for weeks.

With a noise like a whole lot of magic being done at once, a half-mile of whitewater turns to ice.

“Hm,” Sylvain says. “Mages.”

Ingrid shouts, _“Charge!”_

The two armies, neither particularly large, both large enough to kill Felix, meet just south of the river in a clash of screaming horses and Luín’s chalk-and-nails screech. Ingrid wields it like a saber, lit red in its glare as she swipes through men’s heads and cleaves their spines like fat. Felix gives her cover, taking out footsoldiers and snarling pikemen as the enemy’s mages go down to Ingrid’s lance.

In the blistering air, between skeletal trees and howling enemies, Felix falls into a rhythm. It’s clarifying. Simple. He doesn’t know who these people are or why they’ve come, but he doesn’t need to. It’s not politics or diplomacy or trade. It’s not any of the Fhirdiad traps that leave him blinkered and stupid and unable to amount to more than a poor reflection of his father. It’s war. It’s people who aim to hurt Sylvain and Ingrid arrayed against Felix, his body and the long edge of his sword, who will kill them.

Someone yells and he lunges sideways. Then he steps, pivots, and opens a woman’s throat to the weak morning sun. Fraldarius’ shield is high on his arm. Fraldarius’ crest sings in his blood, full and sustaining and fundamental. Like the throb of a second heart—an organ he ignored at his own peril.

A Srenget solider with hair the same burnt-brick color as Sylvain’s swings an axe at his head. He shoves his shield forward, bashing her nose into her brain. A blast of mage-fire takes out her partner, not fast enough to spare him any agony. Sylvain leaps past him, horse straining to clear the still-burning body. He shouts something at Felix. Felix doesn’t hear it.

The ground is growing soft with crushed snow and blood, he’s surrounded by those he’s killed. What a relief. All his miserable, pointless complaining of the morning—it doesn’t matter. It’s not relevant. What has he been doing since the war ended? Who has he been kidding?

“Shield up!” He turns. “Felix, _shield up!”_

He gets the Aegis Shield between him and the river just in time for the blast. It’s a thunder noise, groaning, like all the bells of Garreg Mach hit hard enough to crack. A wave of heat follows, turning the snowy floor to marsh, and when it passes Felix looks up at Sylvain on the river bank surrounded by the dead, bodies flattened and contorted like wheat in the field. The Lance burns in his high hand.

“Thank the Goddess,” Ingrid says, probably loud enough for Sylvain to hear. She and her mount leap the berm of Felix’s kills, headed for the river. Felix follows.

“Many more?” she asks Sylvain, in the churned-dirt clearing he’s made beside the water. She rides her horse like a pegasus, Felix notes—always up in the stirrups, ready to dive.

Sylvain shakes his head. The Lance chatters and preens in his grip. “Not likely. This had to be Tngmet being a pain in our twinned goddamn asses, yeah? He hasn’t got the men to—“

 _“Hey,”_ Felix says. Sylvain, on old instinct, ducks his head behind his buckler. A yellow-fletched arrow bounces off it like a skipped stone.

“Thanks, buddy,” Sylvain says, shaking it off.

“Is now the fucking time for a conversation?”

“It’s not, Felix,” Ingrid says, “thank you for asking.”

“Man, you guys are really making me miss the war, huh? Really reminding me of the best parts of the old days?”

This is reminding Felix of the old days. He doesn’t say this, because Sylvain doesn’t need encouragement.

Ingrid sighs and smears some blood over her forehead as she rubs at it. “Look, if you and I use the relics to sweep the—”

A Srenget soldier is beside her, swinging his axe.

Felix doesn’t know where he came from. Doesn’t matter. The solider is swinging high, aiming for Ingrid’s waist, the seam between her breast- and backplate. He doesn’t even really need to—the axehead is the size of a ship’s prow, and the man’s shoulders like wine barrels. No plate mail is strong enough.

Felix’s shield is loose on his right arm. The soldier is to his left. That doesn’t matter, either.

He steps wide, throwing himself open, slashing up with his sword in hand. The axe goes high. Then, admirably quick, it comes back down.

There’s a moment, just before the animal of Felix’s body tries to survive, when Felix sees that thick iron edge coming for his skull and thinks: but at least he protected them. This is the thing he was good at. Wouldn’t that be enough?

And then he throws his arm up, the arm without the shield, Aegis on the other side of himself, contorting like one of the bodies already dead, and the axe hits. It enters bone. Felix makes a sound that can’t even compare to the axe, the axe, the axe digging a new kind of corpse out his arm, shoulder, ribcage. He hits the ground and can’t tell if the axe followed him down, if it’s still sowing in him, because what could it fucking _matter?_

The snow is cold and seeping wet. Blood tastes terrible. Someone shouts, someone burns alive, someone pulls the axe out of his shoulder. Felix sobs and tries to see if he can vomit.

Ingrid is touching him. “Felix, Felix, no no no no no.”

“You goddamned sacrificial idiot.” Sylvain.

“Shouldn’t have—“ Felix can just about see the ground he’s lying on, like a cliff face, white and muddy brown and quickly staining red. Probably isn’t only his blood. “Shouldn’t have stopped to fucking chat. During battle.”

Ingrid or Sylvain makes a choked, wet noise above him. The other one matches it. Someone’s lovely hand touches his face.

“You have to heal him, now.” Ingrid again.

“I can’t.” The voice sounds wrong.

“Sylvain, this isn’t—he’ll die!”

“I’m not Mercedes, I don’t—“

His right is wet and cold and his left is wet and warm. Felix blinks, slow, like he’s been on the mountainside too long.

“There’s no one else! There’s no one else!”

“I _know,_ I’m _not—“_

“Oh, Goddess, Felix, can you hear me? Felix, honey, open your eyes. Felix!”

“I—“

_“Sylvain!”_

A burning brand, the world on fire, slams into Felix’s side. He howls and seizes, a plea for mercy. It hurts, it hurts, it’ll kill him, it _hurts._ How could they—?

And then he’s out.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning this chapter for some suicidal-adjacent thoughts and a short mention of child abuse.

“...Felix.”

——

“Felix?”

——

“Felix.”

——

“How's he doing?”

“I'm sorry, my lady. Nothing—”

——

“Oh, Felix.”

——

“I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. Fuck, look at me, I can't—”

——

“Felix.”

——

“Look, we have to consider—”

——

“Felix, how long are you going to—”

Felix says, with a rotting stripe of tree bark instead of a throat, “Do you two—”

_“Felix!”_

“ _—ever_ shut up?”

He opens his eyes.

He's in a bedroom, a nice one, all the curtains drawn back and the windows so midmorning-bright he shuts his eyes and groans, head pounding, before he risks another look. When he does, he sees that Sylvain and Ingrid have put him in their own bed. He recognizes the carved posts at the end, the new wallpaper Ingrid hates, the little sitting room beyond the open doors where they got drunk the night before Felix tried to leave.

The other things he recognizes: Sylvain and Ingrid. They're beside the bed, staring at him. With enormous glowing smiles that can't do a lick to hide how miserable they were just a moment ago.

“You're awake,” Ingrid says, leaning so that her body is between him and the too-bright windows. In shadow, he can see that her eyes are red. “How are you feeling?”

“He's gonna say ‘bad,'” Sylvain says beside her, starting to grin. He's crying much more openly than Ingrid.

Sylvain is a week into a beard Felix hasn't seen since the war. Ingrid's hair is long enough to get in her eyes. He's...been out for a while.

“...Like I was hit by an axe,” Felix says, hoarse, much to both their pleasures. “Did we win?”

“Yes, decisively,” Ingrid says, as Sylvain inhales wetly and laughs and wipes at his nose. “We routed them after you fell. It really—I may have—”

“She used Luin,” Sylvain supplies, “just...cleared the field with it. I hadn't even know it could do that.”

“Neither did I,” Ingrid says with a sigh. “It would have been useful during the war. But, regardless, it and the Lance won the day. Tngmet retreated back up the mountain and has been sending us very haughty messengers every morning since.”

“Haughty?” Felix says.

“How dare we not fall to his mighty sword when we had the chance,” Sylvain says, rolling his eyes.

Ingrid smiles. “Don't we understand how badly he needs to impress his vassal lords before they, too, throw him down a crevasse?”

“It's like we don't even care at all,” Sylvain says, with an answering grin. His hands, lightly shaking, are closed in hers. “I'll go up the pass in a few days to treat with him, for all that's worth. You're not invited.”

Felix ignores the jab, which Sylvain meant nothing by and produced on reflex. “You haven't talked with him already?”

“Ah,” Sylvain says. “No.”

Felix glares. “Why not?”

“Well, we...wanted to be here you woke up,” he says. “You were—you did take an axe to the chest, Felix.”

Felix pauses, looking at their tight hands. His body aches profoundly, but not in a way he's unused to after a bad hit. “How long was I out?” he asks.

“Eight days,” Ingrid answers, with a grimace. That they don't know what they would have done had he slept a moment longer, is becoming clear.

“Have I been in your bed this whole time?” Felix asks, nose wrinkling. He's not really sure how to handle the way Ingrid and Sylvain are looking at him and overall he'd rather not. “Where were you two sleeping?”

“We were just fine. Your room was free, after all.”

Felix frowns. “I sleep in that bed every time I stay. Did you two fuck in it?”

Ingrid snaps her head back like a cat presented with its most hated enemy (an orange peel). “I— _what?_ No!”

Sylvain leans forward. “We did. Thank you for asking.”

“Ugh,” Felix says, disgusted but not, he finds, necessarily displeased as Ingrid and Sylvain argue which of a variety of sex acts Felix isn't listening to qualify as ‘fucking.' “Well, thank you for…putting me up.”

Ingrid pauses, letting go of Sylvain's red ear to look at Felix like he's just grown a tail and started to bark. “Felix,” she says, a bit slow, “you took an axe for me. You saved my life. Don't thank us for this.”

They're both looking at him, with steady eyes and the daylight behind them, as if they would be happy enough to sit with him forever, several years and a day, until he understood whatever it was they were trying to impart upon him. “Hmm,” he hums instead, turning his head away, into their soft, red pillows.

“Felix,” Sylvain says at length, “there is something I—” another pause, as Felix considers the mirror-white mountains outside the window, his own curling hairs left on Ingrid and Sylvain's sheets, “—something _we_ have to tell you.”

There's only so many serious discussions Felix can tolerate with fifteen minutes of waking up from a should-have-been-fatal wound. “What,” he says, groaning, beginning the agonizing process of tallying each process required to sit up in a comfortable bed, “did you fuck on the couch out there, too?”

“No, it's,” Sylvain says, still as cheerful as a mass grave as Felix rises, then, “Felix, wait— _Felix!”_

Felix shifts up, leaning on his left arm. It isn't there.

Ingrid catches him before he hits the floor.

For a moment, half on the mattress, half held in Ingrid's callused hands, he can't understand what's happened. The room is too warm, his chest heaving, his left arm hangs below him. He can see it. It swings like a rope, like a tree branch only barely attached to the trunk. Felix tries to move it. He tries to move his fingers, half-curled, which brush the deep carpet.

He tries to feel the carpet.

He begins to say something but can't finish the word. He has to start breathing again, huge and gulping, like he's trying to make himself sick. He asks, “What?”

Four hands are on him now, lifting him back, resettling him on the bed. His sword arm follows his body, heavy and mute. Sylvain settles it on the sheets beside him. The room is still bright, they're still saying his name. He can't move his hand. He can't move his elbow. The whole limp thing twitches when he jerks his shoulder, an exquisitely painful action that leaves him gasping. “Felix, _please,”_ Ingrid says, and pulls his face up with a hand on his cheek, forcing him to meet her eye.

Felix does, frantic. Like he can pry sense from the way she looks up at him. “I'm so sorry,” Ingrid says to him, crouching beside the bed. Her chair's on the floor—she must have knocked it back. “Felix, I'm so sorry. We weren't certain—until you woke up we couldn't tell—”

He was healed. It's far from a perfect art, he's littered with the scars of every hasty patch job Mercedes put him through because they were in the middle of a war and she simply didn't have the time, but he survived. Didn't he survive?

“Felix, I'm _so sorry,”_ Sylvain says, in the wretched-animal way he once told Felix about his father, on the bridge. He's half-seated on the sheets, his thigh alongside Felix's shins. “I had to—there wasn't another choice. It was me, or— I had to. But, you remember, I was never—” he smiles poorly. Felix can't read the expression, Sylvain can't produce it. “I did the best I could. I'm sorry I couldn't do better.”

Ingrid touches them both. Felix feels down his aching side with what he knows he will soon call his ‘good' hand. Under his questing fingertips, prominent even through his shirt, is a heavy, ropy scar. When he shoves his hand under his dead arm he feels it continue, thick as muscle, all the way up his armpit and along his tricep. He beholds the new end of his body.

“Can you,” he says, “leave?”

They respond. “Please,” he says, in a voice that feels related to his own, though distantly.

They speak again, a few more times. They look at him but don't touch him again.

They get up and leave.

Alone, Felix feels at the scar. It aches under his touch, deep and probing, though he knows from experience that the sensation won't last. It'll fade, too. He runs his hand down the dead arm, pressing hard into the dead palm with two fingers. Maybe there's a feeling of faint pressure, maybe there isn't. He won't know for days, likely weeks, what exactly is left of him.

Not enough, though. Not to serve, not to be of any value. That is eminently clear. He can feel his whole life collapsing to the eerie sensation of numb flesh. The chill of it, the odd, unreciprocated softness of something that once belonged to him and has now been re-appropriated. A tumor, essentially. Flesh that bleeds but doesn't function—this is what has replaced his ability to fight, to hold a sword, to write, to serve his kingdom. This is what he'll be now.

Even falling in battle he can't do right. Better to have died than—

He presses as hard as he can into his palm, deforming the tendons. He leaves purple nail marks until they look like a field of dark grass marring his skin. He tries his wrist, the inside of his elbow. He digs for any spark or flare or ache.

The sun rises to the tops of the windows. Outside, the snow begins to fall.

* * *

He doesn't remember much for a while. Presumably they keep him fed.

* * *

There's a whispered argument ongoing at the door. It's been happening for several minutes.

Felix ignores it, watching the room's dim shadows waver in front of the little stove in the corner. Someone came and turned the coals before the argument started. Not Sylvain and Ingrid, who are the ones arguing—they've been arguing, on and off, for several days outside the door. Sometimes inside it, when they think Felix is asleep. Felix couldn't attest how long it's been going on.

“We're going in circles,” Ingrid says, low and growly. The door is open today, enough that Felix could raise his head and watch them do this if he so chose. “You know what we should do.”

“No,” Sylvain replies, sharp, as low as her. “It's had enough fucking blood this winter. I'm not bringing it up the mountain.”

“Then you have to bring soldiers with you.”

“We can't spare them here, not if Tngment doesn't listen. What if he tries again while I'm stuck up the pass? Or if there's an attack from the usual winter raiders? The snow's going to be terrible—”

“Sylvain, god, I _know._ This is what I'm _saying._ We don't have the men and we don't have the time, and if you refuse to bring the Lance with you—”

“I can send word south for reserves. The garrisons can spare a company for us.”

 _“Can_ they? In the middle of a—”

They continue like this. Felix traces mends in the topsheet with the tips of his working fingers as they go back and forth. Ingrid sounds worked up in a way Sylvain is refusing to acknowledge. Sylvain sounds almost scared beneath his hesitance, not that Ingrid cares. They're out of step, talking a foot to the left of each other, like Felix hasn't heard since their school days.

When he waits, watching a strip of wallpaper on which there is nothing to watch, and the urge doesn't fade, he says: “Send Ingrid.”

Their argument goes to smoke. “Felix?” Sylvain says, voice disgustingly soft.

“He doesn't like that option, either,” Ingrid replies, much less hesitant. They're moving closer, into the room, though Felix still doesn't look up. He's already uncertain why he spoke in the first place.

“I don't _like_ that option because it's not a different option,” Sylvain says to her. “We still can't spare the men, and—”

“She'll take Luin,” Felix says, not loud enough to speak over him, but again Sylvain cuts himself off at the first note of Felix's mumbles. “Don't need many men with that.”

The pause this time is less shocked, more considering. A log pops in the little stove like a kernel of corn. “Tngmet saw what it can do,” Ingrid says, working it out for them both. “The diarchs will know now, too. The Lance isn't the only thing that can kill down here.”

“I…agree that the likelihood they'll respect you has gone up significantly,” Sylvain says, sounding unhappy about it. “But you still can't go alone. It'd be suicide. And even if they respect you, they still don't _know_ you. And I can't go with you, not with…”

“No, of course you'll stay.” Do they think Felix can't tell when he's being discussed? “Let me take Genevieve. They certainly know her, and she can carry your sigil. If it's me, her, a few mages to keep the pegasus' wings warm, we could fly up. Sylvain, we'd be a hundred times faster, and it'd be a show of strength in—”

Felix lets the rest wash over him, undisturbed. His dead arm aches sharply, in a crooked white line all the way down to his elbow that started only in the past day or two. He doesn't know what it means. Right now, laying on his back, it's thrown across his stomach like an anchor chain, rusted and cold. He keeps his head turned, cheek pressed to the pillow, as if it will fade away if he pays it no mind. Like a monster in a shadow. Like his brother used to advise, when Felix was too small for any other comfort. Pathetic.

“Hey,” someone says, Sylvain, from beside the bed. Time has passed. “That was a good idea. Thank you.”

Felix remains as he is, breathing slowly. The bed is too large for Felix to feel Sylvain behind him but he knows he's there. He can feel them both.

“Sylvain,” Ingrid starts, voice quiet, when Felix doesn't reply.

“No, no, it's okay,” Sylvain says. The stove crackles again, warm and red. “Another time.”

A hand brushes through Felix's hair, spread like rushes on the pillow, before they go. He doesn't try to stop it. Feet move on the carpet and a light hand shuts the door behind the couple. Felix closes his eyes again.

* * *

He opens them.

“Good evening, my lord Duke,” Sylvain says, with a broad smile.

It's an hour before sunset, the whole room lit richly from the west. Sylvain sits in a chair that he looks to have spent a great deal of time in today. Papers are scattered across his lap and legs, feet propped beside Felix on the sheets, and his fingers are stained with ink. He must have washed his hair this morning—it erupts from his head at every angle, like a cat that's just been thrown from something. He spent a lot more time on it when they were younger, Felix thinks. Before Edelgard and Ingrid.

“So,” Sylvain says, raising a ginger eyebrow. “How long has that been going on?”

He points with his blackened pen to Felix's dead hand, the fingers of which are curling gently against Felix's stomach.

Felix can't answer as he is, for a moment, too suddenly consumed by shame to speak. It's flattening, vicious, plunging its teeth into his neck. This is what Sylvain smiles at him for? A twitching hand? A few contracting tendons and a persistent ache in his arm? This is what he's capable of? What's so worthy of note? What a fucking mistake to have opened his eyes.

He's taking too long to reply, though Sylvain doesn't seem to mind. He's set up camp here, squatting in his own bedroom like he doesn't notice the glaring imposition Felix continues to make of himself. He's still smiling. The muscles never seem to tire.

“So your plan worked pretty well,” he says, doing something complicated with his hand that results in him spinning the pen around his pointer finger like a dancer's baton. “Ingrid got a message back yesterday by mage-relay. Scared the shit out of the little black mage we've got down in the village, who wasn't expecting it in the least. But, regardless, Tngmet very cowed, diarch's peacekeeper very impressed, Luin and Ingrid very much the cool new kids on the mountain. Neat as hell all around. You've never enjoyed the diplomatic arts, but you're not half bad at them, are you?”

Felix has to clear his throat before he speaks. Whatever it is he coughs up and is forced, grimly, to swallow again, tastes like the underside of an aging wyvern. “No,” he croaks at Sylvain, “sending her was obvious. You two were just being idiots.”

Sylvain's big smile gets, somehow, bigger, like warm bread rising to fill the pan. Felix doesn't have the energy for anything, let alone navigating how to roll over without touching his own arm, but he thinks about it. He thinks about it really hard. “So, the fingers?” Sylvain says, still sounding like he's won something.

“They haven't fallen off,” Felix growls.

“Hm,” Sylvain replies, undeterred. “Can you move your thumb? Or is it just those fingers?”

“I can't _move_ any of them.”

“Humor me, sweetheart.”

Felix colors like he's been slapped with it. Sylvain flirting with him hasn't been funny since they were teenagers, when it was funny to Sylvain and Hilda Goneril only. “Whatever,” he mumbles and shuts his eyes.

With concentration, he can move his pinky and ring fingers. With a great deal more concentration, he can move his middle finger. The three of them, he can even sometimes feel what they touch, which is a relief so profound he refuses to experience it. His index finger and thumb--he wills them to move, tightens every muscle in his back and thighs like that will magically compensate for the rest of his body's failure, and he manages a twitch. A light spasm of his thumb, out towards his wrist, in towards his palm.

Sylvain meets this miserable fucking display with a glowing smile. “That was great, Felix.”

“Fuck you,” Felix gasps, embarrassingly winded. He shifts his knees under the sheets, hunching around his stomach.

“I'm sincerely delighted to see you improve, buddy, as much as that may offend you. Here, try this.” He pulls an old leather ball from his pocket, looking like a child's toy in his palm.

Felix snorts. “What do you want me to do with that? Choke on it?”

“Would you? That's not a bad idea,” Sylvain muses, and then that big hand is on Felix's, gently lifting each finger to wrap around the ball. “Squeeze it.”

“I can't,” Felix says. He'd actually felt Sylvain's hand, a brief, hot pressure on the back of his palm. He doesn't think about it.

“You can try.”

”Why?”

“God, you love playing stupid. Because this is the only way you heal from the bad shit, as you well know. Squeeze it.”

Felix tries, though it's ridiculous and futile. Indeed the ball slips from his numb hand almost as soon as Sylvain leans back from the bed. “Alright,” Sylvain says, bending to fetch it. “Let's try again.”

“What's the point?” Felix snaps, feeling weak and too hot and suddenly, childishly close to tears. “What do you fucking expect this to do?”

Sylvain pauses, long arms draped over his knees. He watches Felix, with ginger hair falling in his eyes and a small, reflexive smile. “Miklan broke my wrist when I was a kid,” he says. “It's why I can write with both hands, which I know you hadn't put together before now. Our cook you like so much, Nathalie, gave this to me and told me to squeeze it every day until I felt better. It worked pretty well. Mostly because Dad disowned Miklan that summer, but that ball was helpful, too.”

Felix swallows, chastened. He lets Sylvain push the toy into his hand again. “Ah, I'm never wrong,” Sylvain smiles, closing Felix's thumb around the curve of the leather. “The surest way to a northern noble's heart: his raging guilt complex. C'mon.”

He waits, ink on his fingers and dotting his chin, as Felix tries again. Once or twice more, he crouches to pick up the ball when it's dropped. When he leaves a little while later, called away by the steward at the door, Felix keeps the ball, clutched tentatively between left hand and stomach.

* * *

He follows the sounds of voices down the hall, unsteadier than he would like on the deep carpet. He feels like a dinghy with a very slow leak, tilting left towards a weight he doesn't recognize, but it's just his arm. It is just the stupid arm.

“Oh my god,” Ingrid says when he knocks. Then, with a widening of her eyes, she remembers she's supposed to act like everything is normal and Felix hasn't been turning into a fleshy grey slug in her bedroom for the past however long. Clearing her throat, she says, “Felix, come in.”

“Thanks,” he mumbles, squeezing past her. He doesn't like when the dead arm touches things, never quite sure what it will or will not feel. He has enough motion back to at least keep it close to his body.

Sylvain and Ingrid's office is as bright as their bedroom, the southern wall filled with as many windows as the heating costs will allow. It's got two desks and a plethora of chairs, a fireplace, a couch heaped with old pillows, an adjoining library, books and papers on every surface. Normally Felix would call all the paper detritus Sylvain's, as Ingrid never being much for administration, but both their desks are masses of maps and figures. On the couch, with surprise equally apparent, Sylvain says, “Felix! Good morning!”

“Hmph,” Felix replies. He pauses, barefoot, on the dense carpet, unsure where to sit. This also seems to surprise the Gautier-Galateas. Ingrid hurries to clear an armchair for him, watching with evident delight as Felix curls on it, tucking his feet under his butt.

“Do you need something?” she asks. “Can we get you breakfast, some tea?”

Her freckles are much more prominent than when he last saw her. Scattered across her cheeks and brow, they seem to bring out the rest of her color—her lips made pinker, her eyes a grassier green. “No,” Felix replies, looking away. “I just—heard you, from the bedroom. You're both so loud. What are you working on?”

“Oh, everything,” Sylvain says with a laugh as Ingrid pours him a cup of tea from the pot in the corner anyways, forcing it into Felix's right hand when he tries to refuse it. It is, admittedly, warm and very strong. She presses a kiss to his temple when he takes a sip. “One of the Srenget diarchs, the one whose rep my dear wife trounced in an arm wrestling contest—”

“I did _not,_ Sylvain—”

“Mmm, I can read between the lines—anyways Hafga seems satisfied with the new agreement, but her co-ruler is suddenly even _more_ deferential since they heard about the second relic in the castle, and also that Tngmet nearly killed a duke—”

Felix starts. “Wait, _me?”_

“Would you believe it?” Sylvain laughs.

“You're the highest-ranking noble in Fodlan since Ferdinand gave his title up, plus you're a very famous fighter, even in Sreng,” Ingrid says with a shrug, settling beside Sylvain on the crowded couch. “Diarch Sek seemed to think you almost dying was something Tngment should spend a little more money apologizing for.”

“I…suppose,” Felix replies with a frown. The power inherent in his title makes him uneasy on most days, let alone when his apparent _international reputation_ is brought up. “What are those maps, then? Of Arianrhod?”

He nods to the much-marked paper spread out on the table. As soon as he does, Sylvain begins to fold it, neat and quick, and slides it into another stack of papers. “Just something we're looking into for…Count Rowe,” he says, winking.

Ingrid frowns at him. “Sylvain.”

“It's fine, love,” he says to her, tone firm. “We can deal with it later.”

She rolls her eyes but seems to let him have it. Whatever ‘it' is. Hopefully nothing else to do with Felix's fame in this or any other country. “Right,” Ingrid says to him, turning away from her husband, “while you're here, maybe you can help us with this.”

The problem she presents to him, something about introducing Almyran arid farming techniques to farmers in Galatea, is one that she and Sylvain have obviously already solved. Likely they were decided before he even woke up this morning. But Ingrid lays it out regardless, and he gives them what answers he can from his own experience convincing the stubbornest of his tenants to try rotating _one_ crop in their entire lives. No one had thanked him for it, and it sucked. Ingrid and Sylvain look nigh-swollen with happiness as he tells them about it, which he ignores. Eventually the two of them decide on some plan or another, and they move on to debating the next problem, which, from their tones, they are _not_ re-staging for Felix's supposed benefit.

Folded into their overlarge armchair, gently flexing his bad hand around his second cup of tea, Felix watches them go at it. They're both experienced managers of their lands, much more so than Felix. He's delegated direct oversight of Fraldarius territory for years to allow himself more time in Fhirdiad, but Sylvain and Ingrid have kept themselves involved to a terrifying extent. He thinks if he asked, Ingrid could rattle off every species of weed afflicting Galatea by name and leaf color. It's nearly educational to watch. As the morning lengthens and tea is re-heated and lunch is brought, he watches them, too. Not what they're saying, but how they say it.

They haven't discussed the details of administration with him before, preferring to drink and reminisce and drunkenly touch Felix's hair when he's visited in the past. This, tucked into their study and watching them live up to their titles, is a strange new insight into two of his oldest friends. It's different from when they three talked during the war, or from that dream-like year they spent at the monastery. Sylvain is…as he was always meant to be, beneath all the decency he denied himself. Unflappable, exquisitely settled, like he's finally been made big enough to fill every hole left in him. Seeing it satisfies Felix in a way few other things in his life do.

Ingrid says something despairing, throwing her hands in the air. Felix watches her wrists flash from behind the narrow cuffs of her sleeves. This version of her, almost if not quite as content as Sylvain, he's not sure he would have predicted in those few hours he dedicated to thinking about the future during the war. Sylvain had hated the war, hated every minute of it, but Felix and Ingrid had—found a kind of purpose during it. It seemed to be something they'd waited for, built themselves towards, their entire lives. And yet, here she is, calling her husband ‘three thousand times an idiot' for suggesting they rebuild a road to one of Galatea's smaller ports, while Felix has spent the past five years—

He shakes the thought off. It doesn't serve a purpose. The point is:

The point is Ingrid seems happy. Still pushy, still controlling, but easier to relent. Easier to concede a point, easier even to concede the entire argument. When she insults Sylvain, it's undercut by how obviously, glaringly she loves him. Every brush of her hand to the back of his neck—it's as big and gold and broiling as the sun. That satisfies Felix, too. As much as a sword in his hand or a battle won.

“Wait,” he cuts in, as Sylvain and Ingrid move on to a discussion of cleaning duties in the castle garrison, “wait, wait. Why are _you_ figuring this out?”

They blink at him. “What?” Ingrid says.

“I mean,” he says, “why are you two, the Margrave and Margravine, discussing _cleaning rotations?_ In fact, why have you been deciding any of this little shit? Why don't you give it to your staff?”

Sylvain frowns, brows drawing together. “We do have staff,” he says, “you've seen them around, god knows.”

Felix waves his hand dismissively, still holding the empty mug. “You have cooks and soldiers and pages. Why don't you have anyone for _delegating?”_

Sylvain and Ingrid exchange glances, apparently confused. “Well, we do have Edward, the steward,” Ingrid replies, slow, “but he went down to Galatea last summer to oversee the union of our lands. I suppose we… haven't had anyone to oversee much of the day to day since then.”

“Last _summer?”_ Felix says, and then: _“Edward?_ Wasn't he your _father's_ steward?”

“I—yes,” Sylvain replies quickly, “he's served the family a long time, but he knows Gautier like no one else, and he's been incredibly helpful in Galatea—”

“You two are an _embarrassment,”_ Felix snaps, drawing a started laugh from Sylvain and a glare from Ingrid. “You talk shit about me being an important noble, but at least I act like it. What are you doing? Drawing up chore charts? Hire more staff, staff who can _make decisions for you,_ before you use yourselves up entirely. And your father's geriatric lackey doesn't count, I remember him. He's as much a bastard as your parents ever were.”

“He's not that—” Sylvain starts, as Ingrid puts a hand to his arm.

“No, honey, he really is. I hate him.”

“Well, okay, fine, I hate him, too. But it's not like we had anyone _else_ who knew the grain markets so well!”

“No, of course,” Ingrid sighs.

“But you _should have_ ,” Felix snaps. “You should have years ago! Why have you been living like this?”

“Oh my god,” Sylvain says, slapping his hands to his face, dragging them up through his swooping hair. “Oh my god! Okay. Hi,” he says, stretching an arm across to the table to Felix, smile suddenly big and winning. “Felix, right? I'm Sylvain. Sylvain Gautier. I'm terrified of change. This is my lovely wife Ingrid. She isn't afraid of change, but she does hate it. Can we buy you a drink?”

Felix lasts a meager ten seconds before he snorts a laugh and has to lift his empty tea cup to hid his smile. “Idiot,” he says to Sylvain, who takes it with all the joy of a king's boon. “Hire another steward. Two more stewards. Better ones.”

“As soon as we can,” Ingrid replies with a smile, tipping her head to Sylvain's shoulder. “Thank you again, Felix. You're so full of advice these days.”

“Sothis knows what you'll do when I'm gone,” he mutters, trying to take another sip of his tea before he remembers.

“Well, at least we've got some time to figure _that_ out,” Ingrid says.

Felix pauses, raising an eyebrow. “What are you talking about?”

Sylvain's face changes, his smile suddenly falling away, but Ingrid's already speaking. “I mean the snow's been so bad this month,” she says, “you probably won't be able to get home until Great Tree Moon at the earliest. The pass is going to be closed for months!”

And then she says, “Oh,” and puts one red-knuckled hand to her mouth.

Felix is staring at her. The empty cup slips from his good hand, tilting into his lap. “Excuse me?” he says.

Ingrid rounds on Sylvain. “You didn't _tell him?”_

“When should I have told him?” Sylvain snaps back. “The day he woke up? _Two days_ after that, when the pass _closed?”_

Felix jerks to his feet, both hands fists, the cup falling with a muffled _thnk_ to the carpet. “I can't be here until spring. I have to get back to Fhirdiad. Dimitri needs me.”

They exchange glances again—they keep _doing that,_ like he can't _see them—_ both of them stricken. “Felix,” Sylvain starts, voice strained.

“No, I need to _go home,”_ Felix says, not listening to how the words come out, how he must sounds to them. “I should have left weeks ago, I can't be here now _._ I have _responsibilities.”_

The room is getting smaller. His chest, too, tightening like a screw in a vise. How could he have done this—lost track of time so thoroughly? How long has been here? How many fucking days has he wasted hating himself in his friends' empty bedroom? They must think him such an idiot. _Dimitri_ must think it. God, Dimitri. Dimitri. How can he ever pretend at being his advisor again? He has to get to Fhirdiad. He can't do this. He can't—

“I need a horse,” he says. He pivots, one foot before the other, and then he starts pacing, hair snapping across his face every time he turns. “Or a pegasus. I can fly back.”

“Felix, you don't know how to—”

_“I'll figure it out.”_

They're both staring at him from the couch, Sylvain's hands tight around the edge of the cushions, both of them with that wretched fucking expression. Like Felix doesn't understand how profoundly he's screwed up. Like he _isn't aware._

“You can't fly,” Ingrid starts again, so patient it makes Felix want to rip his own throat out, “it's too cold without magic, and you don't know how. You'd fall off a foot up the mountains. You can't fly.”

“So I'll ride.”

Ingrid grits her teeth. So much for patience. “The road is closed.”

“So I'll open them! Eisner taught me battle magic for something, didn't she?”

“You're going to clear snow with _lightning?”_ Sylvain starts, incredulous, but Ingrid is already replying.

“Felix, this isn't a joke—”

 _“I am aware this isn't a joke!”_ he shouts, far too loud for this sunny room, far too loud for two people he loves and who have only ever loved him in return. “But I _can't be here._ I have to _leave._ And if you won't help me, then I have to—”

Ingrid shouts, _“Look outside!”_

No matter how miserable, how furious he is, he grew up with her. She's bossed him around more times than any of his dead blood relations combined. His feet turn him to the windows.

Outside, the world is enormous, and unfeatured, and white. White from cliff to cliff, the whole of the valley filled and flattened, all the lofty pines weighed with snow until they nearly bend.

All these weeks here, and he hadn't looked out a window. Or he had, and hadn't understood a single thing it meant. “Felix,” Ingrid says behind him.

The snow shines mirror-bright, stinging to look at. Felix turns and pushes past her, past Sylvain beside her, and shoves through the door.

* * *

He's keeping track of the days now. It's all of three before Ingrid and Sylvain land outside the door, arguing.

Sylvain starts, first in earshot: “Hun, I just don't think this is a good idea. He's had a bad few years, this isn't the time to—”

Ingrid next: “I don't care what you think is a good idea! We tried your idea! Now we're trying mine.”

“Ingrid, he isn't a _science experiment._ We're not just going to take turns until he produces the result we want!”

“You do what you like, I'm done sitting around watching this happen. Open the door. He's heard every word of this, anyways.”

They come in from the corridor. Felix is standing in the center of their sitting room, a wooden practice sword lashed to his left hand. Ingrid eyes him, Sylvain looking tall and frazzled behind her. “Oh good,” she says. “You're already warmed up.”

Two nights ago Felix walked down to the castle barracks, asked for a practice sword, and was given it, because he has the freedom to do anything he liked in the Gautier house except leave it. Every waking hour since had been dedicated to the most basic of sword forms, forcing himself through parry, block, and thrust until he stumbled to bed or his arm simply gave out. It was an act of desperation, he was aware. That didn't make him less desperate.

Ingrid's hair is pushed back from her face with a wide cotton band, her sleeves rolled up to her elbows. She's looking at Felix like he's a fight to win or a wall to climb. An ass to beat.

“Good morning,” Felix says, in a flat tone. Ingrid sneers at him.

“We're going to spar,” Ingrid tells him, pulling her own practice sword from under her arm. “Sylvain, push the furniture back.”

Sylvain protests. Ingrid ignores him. “I can't fight,” Felix replies coldly. “In case you forgot.”

Ingrid rolls her eyes, letting Sylvain step around her as he hustles to shove the chairs and couches and little tables back against the walls. The carpet revealed is huge, a pale Dagdan pattern, with big teardrops of color interlocking in repeating patterns from edge to edge. Absent the furniture, it's almost, but not quite large enough for a match.

“Oh, please,” Ingrid says. “Square up, Fraldarius. I'm going to prove a point.”

She's not, by nature, a persuasive woman. That's Sylvain's specialty. Ingrid prefers to force. Felix isn't persuaded by her snippy little line, but he finds himself starving for the force. He wants the ache of concussion like he wants his life back. “Fine,” he says, unties the rope from his hand and wrist, and shakily raises his sword. Ingrid's face settles into satisfied concentration. She lunges.

It is, Felix knows from the first breath, a play bout. She and him have known the steps of it since they were children: high hew, block, low hew, plow guard, thrust, break, slice, repeat. “Do you remember?” Ingrid asks, hardly even winded, as Felix gasps and blocks her blow. “Glenn in the courtyard, that first summer?”

Felix obviously remembers. This fight, this sequence of muscles pushed and pulled, is constant. It's survived everyone who ever taught it to Felix. During the war, unable to sleep, he'd envision it, the thrum of each step, over and over until he could trick himself into unconsciousness. After the war, too. “Yes,” Felix replies. Ingrid brings her sword down, hard, and he grunts as his entire rotten arm is jarred, every bone jangling from fingers to shoulder.

“Hey,” Sylvain calls, from a corner. They ignore him. Ingrid swings again.

“I can't believe you're keeping a grip,” she tells him as he dodges, sweating and shaky. The fight is shifting, ritual slipping away as Felix proves unable to maintain it. He can't block, every block costs him two white-hot seconds of blind agony, so she attacks and now he dodges, letting her chase him around the sitting room. He's not as fast as he should be, but Ingrid hasn't been a sword fighter in years, and she's still unused to the lack of range. She goes for his head and he ducks, grunting when his knees hit the carpet and scrambling to get back up.

Keeping hold of his sword is requiring more mental effort than any insane magic problem Eisner ever set him. “Ready to stop fighting an invalid, then?” he replies from between his teeth.

Ingrid gives him an unimpressed glare. Faster than she's moved at any point so far, she smacks the wooden sword from his weak hand. It goes flying into the nest of chairs by the windows, narrowly missing Sylvain. “Not yet,” she tells him, as he gasps for breath and tries to rub the fundamental ache out of his palm. “Go get it.”

Felix heaves himself up from the carpet, sweat slick down his neck and under his arms. “No,” Sylvain says when Felix holds out his shaking hand for the sword. “Absolutely not, this is nuts.”

“Sylvain,” he growls.

“No! You're going to kill yourself!”

“Sylvain, _give it to me,”_ he snarls, and Sylvain glares back, his own threats implied, but eventually hands it over.

“You're both insane,” he tells Felix.

“Sure,” Felix says. He has to close his own fingers around the hilt with his good hand, holding them there until he can be sure the tendons will hold, before he turns away from Sylvain's mutinous face. “Ingrid.”

She's watching him with an absolutely pitying expression. “You're so fucking stupid,” she tells him, and launches forward.

She fights him twice more, chasing him across the carpet and through the sunshine and showing not an ounce of mercy. Each bout ends with his sword flying, his arm screaming, her expression uncompromising. It's midmorning and he's flat on his ass on their very nice carpet, throat burning and lungs too small for this and the entire left side of his body cleaving away. Ingrid stands over him. Her face is flushed and shining. When he reaches for his sword, whole arm juddering like a rabid little animal, she kicks it away from him. He looks up at her. “Finally done with me?” he asks, showing his teeth.

She looks at him like he's a child. Half her hair has escaped from its band, tufting around her face like petals. “Not until you give me a fair fight,” she says.

Sylvain, still in the corner, still unhappy, makes a noise in his throat. Felix glares with all the ice left in him. “Then give me my sword,” he says.

She holds out her own, wooden blade first. When he reaches for it, she steps on his knee.

“What the _fuck,”_ he howls, wrenching up, but she just levers off and offers him the sword again.

“You're so committed to being hurt,” Ingrid tells him, like she's discussing the cut of his shirt. “Felix, use your other hand.”

He gasps for breath, sucks it down like there won't be enough air in him until he starts puking it back up. His head swims. “What?” he says.

She inhales through her nose, her eyes like those of the saints in the monastery—reflective and high above. Kind of condescending. But she's sincere when she crouches down in front of him, leaning on her sword. She meets his eyes with her own.

“Felix,” she says, “you are stuck here until the spring. You're stuck here, with us, and your arm may never be the same again. And I am _sorry_ about that. I am so genuinely sorry that this happened to you and that you have to go through it. Although,” she adds with a flickering smirk, “I know you don't particularly care how I feel.”

His body aches like it's been ground down to a splintering stub, used far past of the point of use or replacement. The twitch of his mouth matches her own. “Your words,” he says.

She smiles more truly, cheeks bunching under her eyes before it eases away. The room is getting warm around them, heated by thin sunshine and Sylvain's fretting and their own exertions. “It's different, Felix,” she tells him. “But it's not over. I've been beating you because you've been letting me, because you're stupid. Stop letting me. Roll with what you're dealt.” She wiggles one hand, wave-like, between them. Then she jerks her head at Sylvain. “Like him.”

Felix looks at Sylvain, who's wringing his hands on the couch. “This has taken eighteen years off my life,” Sylvain says. “But sure, be more like me, you incurable meatheads.”

Ingrid grins again and stands, groaning a little as her knees pop. “Come on, let's go,” she says to Felix, still propped on the carpet. “Use your good hand.”

Felix thinks about it. He's not as deft with his right. He knows the motions, but without the years of practice transposing them to his off side has always felt like speaking a language he only half-remembers, or trying to compliment Annette without making her mad. Tricky.

He flexes his left hand then his right. Only one of them feels like it's been held over a fire until the fat started to stink. She'll probably still beat him. She hasn't spent five weeks semi-comatose and squeezing a little ball. But, he must admit, acknowledges he has been forced to admit, he does still have a good hand. Relatively. He could try using it.

“Okay,” he says, and takes the offered sword.

**Author's Note:**

> time to get this sucker out of gdocs!! god willing!! i'm on twitter at @[lambergeier](https://twitter.com/lambergeier/), fire emblem-specific @[firegeier](https://twitter.com/firegeier/). PLEASE come bother me and ask me if i've written more yet (offer good for this fic only) bc i AM unemployed and quarantined and i NO LONGER have excuses.


End file.
